by Christophe de Roquefeuil
BAGHDAD, July 30 (AFP) - US Secretary of State Colin Powell said Friday that Washington was determined to stand strong in Iraq, bogged down in a worsening foreign hostage crisis and persistent clashes between US troops and insurgents.
"We are facing challenges in the weeks ahead, but we are determined to overcome (them)," Powell told reporters, flanked by President Ghazi al-Yawar, after talks with Iraqi and US officials in Baghdad.
The dovish secretary of state is the most senior US official to visit the country since the US-led occupation authority returned sovereignty to a caretaker government late last month.
"I reaffirm our determination and commitment to keep working with the interim government as they go about the process of establishing democracy on the basis of freedom and human rights in Iraq," he said.
Powell paid tribute to the Iraqi government, lauding "the courage and determination they have shown in the face of adversity".
For his part, Yawar stressed that Baghdad was dealing with the United States as a sovereign partner and denied that recently appointed US ambassador John Negroponte was manipulating the government.
Iraq's caretaker administration has struggled to win popular support more than a month after the US-led coalition formally relinquished sovereignty, with many Iraqis seeing it as the product of the occupation.
"Ambassador Negroponte is working 100 percent as a diplomat, an ambassador of a superpower like any other US ambassador anywhere in the world," Yawar said.
Powell, a former chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, paid his third visit to Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion as the country grapples with an escalating hostage crisis and chronic insecurity.
Just two days after a massive suicide bombing and a wave of attacks across the country left more than 120 people dead, Yawar said the insurgents were "getting more helpless and hopeless".
At least four explosions boomed across central Baghdad during Powell's meetings, one of which sounded when a mortar round hit a house, causing no casualties, said an AFP correspondent on the scene.
In Kufa, a stronghold of Shiite Muslim radical leader Moqtada Sadr, two people were wounded at a bus station outside a hospital, said a source at the health centre.
Overnight, at least 13 people died when US troops battled insurgents in the flashpoint city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, hospital sources and police said.
The US Marine Corps confirmed it pounded insurgent positions in Fallujah with artillery and air fire after mortar rounds, rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire rained down on one of their positions.
The US military has conducted at least seven air strikes over the past month on suspected hideouts of loyalists of alleged Al-Qaeda operative Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, most of them in southern Fallujah, killing dozens of people.
The Jordanian-born militant's faction has claimed the kidnappings and killings of numerous foreigners, who have fallen victim to the country's perilous hostage crisis.
At least 25 foreigners have been reported snatched or missing in Iraq, after a colleague was quoted as saying Friday that two Syrian truck drivers were abducted near the infamous Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad.
India said it was working "round the clock" to release three Indian hostages after kidnappers threatened to kill one of their captives at 7:00 pm (1500 GMT) and filmed a video showing a rifle cocked to the head of the captive.
Militants holding the three drivers, along with three Kenyans and an Egyptian, have demanded that their Kuwaiti employer quit Iraq or see them carry out their grisly threat.
But an Iraqi tribal chief acting as go-between for the captors issued an 11th-hour appeal to them to stay their threat.
"In my name and in the name of humanity and religious leaders, I appeal to the Secret Army - Black Banners Battalion, to rethink the matter and not to execute the hostages," Sheikh Hisham al-Dulaimi told AFP.
The Kuwaiti company has sent a representative to Baghdad and would be in touch with him later in the day, Dulaimi said, but there was no indication that the haulage firm was ready to cease its operations in Iraq.
According to videotapes aired Thursday by Arab television stations, four Jordanians and a Somali are also being held by two separate groups in Iraq.